Noting that the Java store front "smells of new paint," Danny thanks the people who have contributed to the processing of improving the Java Store through participating in the Java Store survey.

While "the shelves are fast filling up with the kind of assortment of games, facebook and twittery map style apps you come to expect from an app store," the best news for developers who want to use the Java Store to earn income may be the "rumor" that a payment system for purchasing applications may soon be in place.

To me, being able to actually sell your applications is the game changer for professional developers.

Stateful web/ejb components are convenient to use and maintain - they look and feel almost like real objects (see the perfect anti-facade). You don't have to synchronize the state between layers - after transaction everything is flushed transparently to the database. This happens without any expensive copying and data / DTO transformation between layers...

Since the announcement of the
href="http://www.java.com/en/store/index.jsp">Java Store at the
href="http://java.sun.com/javaone/">last JavaOne, the team has
been busy. The warehouse
is really taking
href="http://channelsun.sun.com/video/java+warehouse+-+part+1+of+3/30631799001">shape now, and the
href="http://www.java.com/en/store/beta-program.jsp?cid=9400">store
front smells of new paint with its final redesign (
href="https://secure.opinionlab.com/ccc01/o.asp?id=IicWmgOf">thanks
for the comments). There's a rumor that the
href="https://www.paypal.com/">cash registers may arrive real
soon. And best of all, the shelves are fast filling up with the kind of
assortment of
href="http://www.swensonfunnies.com/arcade/zombie4/zombie4.php">games,facebook
and twittery
href="http://www.beeweeb.com/">map style apps you
href="http://www.phphosts.org/2009/09/apple-app-store-hits-2-billion-downloads-85000-apps/">come to expect from an app store (
href="http://larvalabs.com/blog/iphone/android-market-sales/">whether
people actually come or not)...

Today I've digged deeper into one of the nastiest problems I ever encounted since I became a Java programmer. The problem was this - I have the Hudson slave agent program, which blocks on stdin for read almost all the time. This process uses other threads to perform other activities (what this thread does is actually driven by what it reads from stdin, but that's irrelevant to this bug.) On Windows, I've seen on several occasions that this process hangs...

This semester, I am teaching the CS1 course again. If you just teach plain Java, it isn't easy to come up with interesting lab assignments. Some of the students have built exciting animations with Alice in the CS0 course. Somehow, they aren't as excited about printing prime numbers or digits of π in CS1. But the latest version of Alice, now in beta, can be programmed in Java. This is very cool. Students can write Java code that directs the Alice models. For example, one assignment asks students to make a Car class whose drive method moves the car and reduces the gas in the tank. (I couldn't find a gas gauge, so I used the cat clock. The tail moves to the left as the tank gets emptier.) I provide the code for moving the car and rotating the tail, and the students compute the gas consumption...

In the Forums, Shinya Ogino posted Help wanted: v3 localization: "Hi, If you are interested in localized version of GF v3, and following is *not* the language you speak, please consider reading a bit about CTI below. German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese..."

Our current Spotlight is this week's Economist magazine feature on "The power of mobile money": "mobile phones have evolved in a few short years to become tools of economic empowerment for the world’s poorest people. These phones compensate for inadequate infrastructure, such as bad roads and slow postal services, allowing information to move more freely, making markets more efficient and unleashing entrepreneurship ... With such phones now so commonplace, a new opportunity beckons: mobile money, which allows cash to travel as quickly as a text message..."

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